


Light and Dark, Song and Singer

by Trapelo_Road475



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-31
Updated: 2013-01-31
Packaged: 2017-11-27 17:36:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/664634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trapelo_Road475/pseuds/Trapelo_Road475
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lay-lines connecting every world - story-tellers and song-makers and realm-jumpers all know the truth of magic and that is why it is called spinning yarns and that is why it is a line of music.  </p>
<p>Victor and Jefferson and remembering.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Light and Dark, Song and Singer

"I remember you," the doctor had said to him, out on the boardwalk, eyes red-rimmed in the whisper-lick of dawn.

In another lifetime, in another world whose deep heart perhaps still beats, yes, they had known each other. They had taken hand in hand and sprang the gates between the worlds. 

Every time you crossed the boundaries, a little of the world, a little of the magic brushed on you, like pollen on the legs of a bee in the lazy summer. And every time you crossed with someone else, it left another, subtle mark, something shared, something down below the latticework of lay-lines where perhaps all magic sprang from.

"I remember you," Victor had said. He had a name in this world. Whale. Doctor. Doctor then. Doctor now. Victor still. Jefferson remembered everything. His life. The lives of others. The days in days out that never changed before Emma came. The days like Wonderland where his neck throbbed and his mind lay like a banished saint chained on rocks and drowning in the surf. The days of eternity and grief.

Once, it doesn't matter when because everything before Swan came was only once, and forever, and yesterday, once he lay the gleaming edge of shears to his own flesh, and the wound didn't heal, and it didn't rot, and it didn't heal, until the clock ticked, the curse trembled and broke, and now he bore another scar and now he still remembered.

In Victor's murky eyes he saw and recognized and remembered. Grief. Of something wrenched away and your heart left crippled and half-mad. He knew those eyes he saw in the mirrors and the windows and the puddles in his garden after soft rains. 

Jefferson had spent twenty-eight years alone in two lives, and even now Grace lived most days with her -

Family. 

\- and even now he paced his house and he read and he watched the sky and tried to match the stars with the ones he had grown up with and he read and he sewed dolls and friendly little beasts for Grace, which she always gave two names but would only tell him one.

Even now he was often alone.

He remembered Victor. No one else, but maybe Rumplestiltskin knew, and Regina. The man had raised the dead, and learned the dead should be left.

Grief. Wrenching. Do not forget. What if you forget. The dead. 

He lived a long time with an altar of a sort in his hovel in the forest with his daughter because he was afraid he would forget his wife, his child's mother, the woman he had so loved and lost between the lay-lines of the worlds.

His fault. His fault. He doesn't forget. 

Victor was drunk, that dawn on the boardwalk with the incoming tide tapping insistently on the pilings below. Hissing on the sand. Jefferson said nothing back. The gulls reeled, perched, and plucked their feathers. He wondered if the birds had come from their worlds as well. He had passed a crow on the road once, smeared red and black into the pavement, eyes milkwhite and body caving. What would happen if he died here. 

Victor then did not remember. He could not bring them back.

Merciful. What little in this world was.

"You didn't come back," Victor said, on the boardwalk above the slowly turning tide. "Where did you go?"

"Wonderland," Jefferson whispered, and the weight of eternity struck him like a fist in his back. He did not look at Victor for a long time, and when he looked back up, the doctor was gone. The air smelled like salt. Sometimes Jefferson cannot be sure the world is real. He wasn't sure, just then.

Jefferson went back to his house, and the quiet sank his chest like the dead bird's, and he thought about the violin in its case on the high shelf but no, he had played the fiddle long ago to woo a beautiful woman who bore him a beautiful daughter who danced in her cradle when he played the fiddle long ago.

Days pass in this new world that has days that pass and he goes to the piano instead. 

A song comes to him. Like the dreams he used to have, in the days he was the realm-jumper, the dreams of a world he did not yet know, not premonintions but greetings, a softer coming like the smell of earth and rain in spring, or a harsher rasp that ground a rail against his mind and sent him awake sweating and trembling. The music just comes to him, and the vibrations all around him are not unlike the magic that ties the realms together. He feels it, a quiver in his belly, a tingle down the back of his spine, an itch deep inside his brain. 

(a long time ago when he had touched hands with Victor and leapt, it had felt like grabbing a lay-line in his teeth like a long time ago when he had first looked into the eyes of his wife who was beautiful and sang, in body, in soul, in tongue.)

He misses the first knock and the second, but the third perches like a raucous bird on his music and he stops because he never gets visitors but he never gets visitors so why bother? 

Magic. It whispers at him. There is magic in every world and even Victor's but you have to reach, you have to understand, it's like a language, like the story of Babel in the books that he reads storytellers and song-makers and realm-jumpers all know the truth of worlds and that is why it is called spinning yarns and that is why it is a line of music. Connection. 

When he opens the door Victor is there, sober, his eyes clear and curious as ever Jefferson saw them in his homeland, in both their lands, Victor had paused to peer at the doors beyond the gates and had whispered, remarkable.

He had said that about the flowers and the grass and the trees and the earth and the mushrooms and the colors of fire and fabric. Magnificent. Remarkable. Extraordinary. 

Victor did not believe in magic as he thought of it but he did know it even if he didn't believe he knew it. 

"Why are you here?" Jefferson says.

"Because - " Victor hesitates. "I was walking by. I heard you playing."

It is a lie that Victor thinks Jefferson will believe is the truth but Jefferson believes it because Victor thinks it is a lie. 

I heard you. 

How do you do this?

This?

How does it work?

Listen.

Listen.

"Where I came from, we were taught music as children - " Again, the hesitation. 

Victor doesn't believe he knows why he is here. Jefferson knows. Jefferson leans back from the door. 

Magic isn't magic. It isn't rabbits and hats and silk scarves and disappearing women in trick boxes.

Victor tracing the sleek curves of his piano. Victor sitting at the bench with a quick, questioning look. Jefferson sitting beside him. Victor beginning to play a song that he knows with all his heart because he closes his eyes and there is almost a smile playing on his lips. Before long he is singing softly, something simple, something in a language from his home-realm. Softly singing softly.

"Gerhardt," Jefferson says. Victor jerks beside him. 

A long time ago before the curse and before he remembered eternity, Jefferson had met the doctor and the brother, light and dark, the healer and the soldier, but both sharing in that same curiosity, that same honor, that same dogged determination.

He feels Victor's body, so terribly close, slump next to his. "I had forgotten you met him. How could I forget that? He was so delighted with you. Just like when - our father - had dignitaries over, travelers from other countries. How could I forget."

"Gerhardt's song."

"His favorite. Our favorite. He sang better than I did, but I played the piano better."

Light and dark and song and singer. Alive and dead and grieving and gone.

Jefferson taps an abstraction of a tune from the keys nearest his left hand. He draws closer to Victor, feels the smudge, the dust, the whisper, the wish of magic from the deep wells of the worlds. Twenty-eight years alone is a long time and not enough to commune your body with what shreds of magic are hidden in this world and what you remember. 

Jefferson kisses Victor on the cheek, just in front of his ear, smells him, smells hospital and soap and the drizzle he's been walking in. Just kisses. Victor lays his right hand on the keys. Plays a slow snatch of the melody before. Jefferson plays it back on the lower octave.

"Sometimes I don't want to remember. What happened. But I have been thinking - " His fingers pause. "I wouldn't remember this."

Jefferson had remembered everything. He hated it. His daughter had been alive and happy and far beyond his reach. Victor's brother was dead, in wherever world the dead came to rest, a world Jefferson had never come to, a world he was not sure existed. The dead went like a fading note, like a dream in the sun. 

Victor's lips chase his then, and touch, something like the way his hand grazed the piano, something tentative like a wound new-scarred.

But they only sit shoulder to shoulder, with their hands resting on the keys. Jefferson knows that if he listened hard enough he would hear Victor's heart, beating out across the weave of the worlds.

But he listens instead to the drizzle on the darkening windows. 

Jefferson remembers the way his body had craved Victor's since they had first touched hands. He remembers the shock of it, the ache and sorrow and the memory of his wife laid open raw a gutted fish still twitching with a lie of life. 

And he wants it still and because he remembers everything it doesn't surprise him.

It still aches.

So he just leans a little, and Victor relaxes, and Victor hums the little melody again, Gerhardt's song, the song of the dead, the song no longer forgotten.


End file.
